Sunday, September 21, 2014

In the period
1942-45 the Office
of Strategic Services station in Bern, Switzerland (headed by Allen Dulles)
collected information from occupied Europe and transmitted intelligence reports
back to Washington. Some of these reports were decoded by the German and the Finnish
codebreakers.

The
following message can be found in the Finnish national archives. The original
was copied from NARA, collection RG 59.

Monday, September 15, 2014

During WWII
the top Allied officials in the US and the UK frequently communicated via a
radio-telephone link protected by the Bell Labs A-3 speech scrambler. This
device was not secure enough to be used at such a high level but since no other
alternative was available it was used extensively by military personnel,
diplomats and even Roosevelt and Churchill.

‘The SIGSALY system was inaugurated on 15
July 1943 in a conference between London and the Pentagon (the original plan
had called for one of the terminals to be installed in the White House, but
Roosevelt, aware of Churchill's penchant for calling at all hours of the night,
had decided to have the Washington terminal moved to the Pentagon with
extensions to the White House and the Navy Department building.) In London, the
bulk of the SIGSALY equipment was stored in the basement of Selfridges
Department Store, with an extension to Churchill's war room, approximately a
mile away……….. With the coming of SIGSALY, the shortcomings of the less
than effective A-3 were now a thing of the past’.

This doesn’t appear
to be the whole truth. While it is true that the system was installed in July
1943 it didn’t work properly till late 1943 and it only become fully
operational in April 1944. Even after it was installed officials continued to
use the A-3 for most of their communications since the only Sigsaly link was available
at the Cabinet War Rooms and only a small number of officials had authorization
to use it.